Jacqueline Pascal (1625-1661) was once the sister of Blaise Pascal and a nun on the Jansenist Port-Royal convent in France. She used to be additionally a prolific author who argued for the non secular rights of girls and the precise of conscientious objection to royal, ecclesiastic, and kinfolk authority.

This publication provides choices from the complete of Pascal's occupation as a author, together with her witty adolescent poetry and her pioneering treatise at the schooling of ladies, A Rule for Children, which drew on her studies as schoolmistress at Port-Royal. Readers also will locate Pascal's devotional treatise, which matched every one second in Christ's ardour with a corresponding advantage that his girl disciples may still domesticate; a transcript of her interrogation by way of church professionals, within which she defended the debatable theological doctrines taught at Port-Royal; a biographical cartoon of her abbess, which awarded Pascal's notion of the right nun; and a range of letters supplying lively defenses of Pascal's correct to perform her vocation, despite patriarchal objections.

Via well-informed and nuanced readings of key files from the fourth via fourteenth centuries, this booklet demanding situations historians' long-held ideals approximately how ideas of Greco-Roman theater survived the autumn of Rome and the center a while, and contributed to the dramatic triumphs of the Renaissance.

In the course of a life of scholarship and instructing, Hans-Martin Schenke produced quite a few guides within the fields of recent testomony, Gnosticism, and Coptology. This number of his essays and booklet experiences bears witness to his love for the linguistic points of Coptology and illustrates his wide-ranging curiosity within the improvement of early Christianity.

During this quantity of essays the Graeco-Roman heritage and context of early Christianity are explored for major parallels. From the athlete metaphor in 1 Corinthians nine to the function of Aphrodite because the goddess of affection and sexuality, the real cultural symbols and terminology that the 1st Christians hired are tested.

In her subsequent Report of Soeur Jacqueline de Sainte Euphémie to the Mother Prioress of Port-Royal des Champs,17 Soeur Jacqueline recounts her struggle to accept the advice of her superiors to enter the convent without a dowry and to overcome her repugnance at the humiliation of an undowered vocation. Breaking the link between a dowry and the right to pursue a religious vocation constituted one of the axes of Port-Royal’s reform of monastic life. In her later practice as novice mistress, Soeur Jacqueline would stress the freedom of the religious vocation and its independence from financial considerations.

By the beginning of the seventeenth century, the convent had declined to a dozen nonobservant nuns living in a dilapidated building. In 1608 the young abbess, Mère Angélique, began a vigorous reform that made the convent a model of asceticism. Flush with new vocations, in 1630 the community moved to a larger building in the Faubourg Saint-Jacques: Port-Royal de Paris. In 1638 a group of laymen (les solitaires) occupied the old buildings at Port-Royal des Champs and began their petites écoles for boys, complementing the work of the con-vent school for girls revived by Mère Angélique.

As was customary in monastic houses, Jacqueline expected her family to provide her convent with a substantial dowry at the moment she professed her vows. Since her father had left a large bequest to his three children, she assumed that her share of the inheritance would constitute this dowry. Unexpectedly Blaise and Gilberte, now married to Florin Périer, opposed the project and threatened legal action to keep the money in the family. In her subsequent Report of Soeur Jacqueline de Sainte Euphémie to the Mother Prioress of Port-Royal des Champs,17 Soeur Jacqueline recounts her struggle to accept the advice of her superiors to enter the convent without a dowry and to overcome her repugnance at the humiliation of an undowered vocation.